Well, this happens when I don’t hit MandrivaClub often enough lol!
On March 16th, the club posted an interview with François Bancilhon, current CEO of Mandriva, in which he explains his point of view of Gael Duval’s departure from Mandriva.
In the interview, Bancilhon says that Gael wasn’t fired, he was laid off, which isn’t the same thing (I have to agree with him that the two are different things). He also says that Gael’s parting of ways doesn’t mean that the company is changing directions, even tho they “still have within the company and the management lively debates about the strategy and its implementation”…so…they won’t change strategy, because they haven’t decided on one yet? Or what does he mean? A few lines afterwards, he says that “[w]e (Mandriva) believe the current strategy is sound.”
He also talks about the target markets for Mandriva: individual users on one hand and organizations on the other.
Bancilhon assures us that individual users are still an important target for the company, and for some reason I believe him…and hope they stay on that path. As an individual user, I’d really really hate for Mandriva to do the RedHat and dump us on the trash to focus on organizations only.
He also says that the company “remain[s] committed to provide a complete free distro (Free Mandriva and soon Mandriva One) and to make its update free.” This is important to me as an advocate…I wouldn’t advocate Mandriva to new users (which I’ve done for years) if it weren’t free. Every newbie that ever set foot in the local LUG back when we used to meet here at my house (we spent…3 years or so doing the meetings here) got a Mandriva (Mandrake, back then) install on his/her computer, and more than a few stayed with Mandriva up until now. But that wouldn’t have happened without a free and Free Mandriva…there’s too many debian users in any LUG for any commercial-only distro to be acceptable.
The Interview is a very interesting read, and seems to me like it was what was needed to calm down all the worries we Mandriva users had when we heard of Gael’s departure. I don’t think this is just a smoke screen to try to salvage things, and believe that the company will do well if they don’t forget that the individual users are the base of their company.
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Tags: Thoughts
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